New principal at Parker School wants to be different to make a difference

Sunday

Sep 26, 2010 at 12:01 AMSep 26, 2010 at 6:57 AM

Paul Fay, a longtime educator with a broad range of experience, has taken over the reins at John Avery Parker Elementary School, which is facing a state mandate to improve significantly its student performance.

CHARIS ANDERSON

NEW BEDFORD — Paul Fay, a longtime educator with a broad range of experience, has taken over the reins at John Avery Parker Elementary School, which is facing a state mandate to improve significantly its student performance.

Fay, who came to the city from three years as a middle school principal in Falmouth, recognizes the challenges ahead, but said part of what attracted him to the position was the opportunity to help children who are being underserved.

"It's a very compelling mission, but it's very immediate," he said. "We need to do something now "» What we've been doing, it's not enough."

Parker was one of 35 schools identified earlier this year as the state's lowest performing.

The designation as a so-called "Level 4" school — schools with low student performance over a four-year period that are not demonstrating substantial improvement or student growth — required the district to make significant changes at Parker.

The school did hit its adequate yearly progress, or AYP, target in the 2010 mathematics MCAS. Parker's overall score improved on the English language arts exam but not enough for it to make AYP, according to data on the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education website.

The details of many of the required changes, including lengthening the school day, developing a family center at the school, and bringing in outside agencies to provide additional services to students, are still being finalized, according to School Superintendent Mary Louise Francis.

An initial, "balcony-level" turnaround plan will be submitted to the state this fall, she said, with a more detailed redesign plan to follow by January.

One change that was required immediately, however, was the removal of the school's former principal, Sunita Mehrotra, who had been at Parker for six years.

Mehrotra is now serving as the district's director of sheltered English immersion, according to Francis.

A selection committee that included representatives from the School Department, the School Committee and the community interviewed about eight candidates who were culled from an initial pool of about 20 applicants, said Francis.

Each member of the committee submitted three names to Francis, who selected three finalists to interview before naming Fay to the position.

Francis said she knew Fay from when he was the middle school principal at the Global Learning Charter Public School, a position he held from 2003 through 2007.

"He's an experienced principal, and really a charter school, in its own way, is a turnaround type," she said.

"He really could talk in great detail about school and district improvement efforts and all of the underpinnings. And again, he had done that."

Fay, a Quincy native, wasn't always an educator.

After graduating from Boston College, he pursued a career in the computer industry.

But after 22 years in the business, including eight years at IBM, Fay reached a point where he thought it was time to give back.

"I had always been interested in teaching," he said. "That would be a new challenge."

He started in the education world as a mathematics and computer science teacher at Nativity Prep, a Jesuit middle school in Boston for boys from low-income families.

Fay didn't stay in the classroom for long, switching into an administrative position relatively soon after his career change.

"I knew I would get pulled that way," said Fay. "I had had a lot of management experience."

"It's a trade off," he said, "You don't have the hour-to-hour contact with the students "» On the other hand, administration was familiar to me in a way, and I was kind of convinced that I could do some good on that level for a school"

Fay has worked at several schools over the past 18 years, including a large elementary school in Kingston, a Commonwealth charter school in Boston and the Global Learning Public Charter School in New Bedford.

New Bedford resident Eddie Johnson, who was on the selection committee, said Fay stood out for him because of the breadth of his experience in both traditional public and charter schools.

"What made Paul Fay stand out for me "» (was) his background, his exposure, his serious commitment to education," said Johnson. "And his experience at making former schools where he had been employed at very productive, very competitive."

He was most recently in Falmouth, but as a self-described "city kid," Fay jumped at the opportunity to come back to New Bedford, a city in which he still has connections from his years at the charter school.

Tom Davis, executive director of the Greater New Bedford Industrial Foundation and a board member at Global Learning, said the principal selection committee made an outstanding choice in Fay.

"He's a great leader and motivator; he knows his stuff," said Davis. "He's also very good at reaching consensus to kind of move the school in the right direction."

As an administrator, Fay said he wants to be a strong facilitator, not someone who subscribes to a strict hierarchy.

"It's all about what happens in the classroom," he said. "I want to empower the teachers here as much as I possibly can."

Right now, Parker has a certain record, said Fay, and he and the school's staff are going to do everything possible to improve that record.

To achieve that goal, however, it might be necessary to think about teaching a little differently, according to Fay.

"It's a new world," he said. "We can't pretend it's going to take less time, or the same amount of time."

Likewise, people might need to move away from traditional models of teaching toward new ways of doing things, according to Fay.

We've "got to get away from the classic 'chalk and talk,'" he said. "How do we involve (the students) in their own education?"

Fay said something as simple as a teacher changing the way she questions her students could yield new insights into how the children are thinking — and learning.

When a teacher asks a question and a student answers incorrectly, or responds with an answer other than the one for which the teacher was looking, one approach the teacher could take — perhaps the more traditional approach — is to say, 'No, that's not right,' and move on the next student with a raised hand, according to Fay.

A different approach, Fay said, is for the teacher to engage the student with the wrong or unexpected answer in a conversation about the response: Can you show me how you got to that answer? Who else in the class had the same answer?

"You're starting to see fine lines of difference in the ways kids think and respond," he said. "You probe and you see: what is the child thinking?"

Fay is at Parker because he wants to be, and that question — do you want to be at this school? — is one he has already asked the school's staff to think about, he said.

"I'm going to be asking people all year to make up their minds if they want to be part of the team," he said. "What I don't want to do is present to anyone that I'm a savior."

But, he said, "I'm willing to work with other people ... to figure out how we deliver better services to these children."

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